Archive for January, 2010

Good day, fellow phixrs. We just uploaded a new version with the following visual improvements:

The Color effects, Blur/Soften/Distort tools and sharpen tools now support the selection. Remember this one? “Selecting” means marking a part of the image by clicking left, moving the mouse and releasing the button. The area covered will highlight, and this is called a “selection”. The news is that you can now sepia-tone only a part of the image, and this goes for all the tools mentioned in the beginning.

Phixr now stores three steps of your work to which you can return using the undo tool. “Revert” can also be undone.

The zoom blur tool has two new features: First, you can select a center. Second, you can select the size of this center (in form of a circle’s radius) which remains unblurred. The radial blur tool also allows selecting a center now.

New glass tile effect in Blur/Soften/Distort tools

The border tool offers a wooden picture frame.

Using the selection to restrict effects to specific areas of the image

Hallo again. The last post is already over a week old, shame on us. It’s not that we aren’t writing, thing is that we’re writing program code these days… and lots of it. Here is today’s list of news:

The old “despeckle” tool grew into a “noise tools” tool, and we added a film grain feature. (Well, not a big deal: You can add some noise to your photo. Looks good sometimes.)

The “blur tools” now also have motion blur, zoom blur and a new, much faster radial blur. Furthermore, you can now pixelize your photo, like it was part of a computer game in the 1980s.

The “sharpen” tool got a new “unsharp mask” feature. You can create high-contrast photos using this (however, this is neiher HDR, nor “HDR-ish”).

The “color tools” got some additional friends: “Make love, not war” make your photo like it’s been taken in the early 1970s (or 60, if you like). “Sobel” shows the photo’s edges, looks good if blended into the original photo. The “poster” and “two-color” tools aren’t new, but found a more suitable home here. Also, they allow more adjustments now.

In the “special effects” section, we have a new “magic halo” tool. Have a look yourself, it’s hard to describe.

Wherever you could mix the original photo into the processed one, you can now not only mix (“normal”), but apply various operators known from the “decorate” and “mix photos” tools.

We again updated our contrast and brightness feature. The contrast now works adaptive to the very photo’s histogram.

We again updated the preview feature in the blur, noise, sharpen, special fx tools.

JPG and PDF can now be downloaded/saved in various quality levels, and you get a preview of the compresseion quality result. PNG8 is now supported.

We hope that we can catch up on the blog front soon. Until then, as usual, we leave you with a few random samples for the new features:

The old “sepia” tool changed into a generic “color effects” tool. The “black and white“, “invert” and “equalize” tools have been integrated here now, and we added a few new ones such as duo tone, triple tone, heatmap, cross process (xpro), neon, infrared. Also, you can now change the photo’s contrast and brightness on-the-fly, and reduce the effect’s impact by changing its opacity (ie fading it into the original photo).

The old “lomo” tool was changed into a generic “camera effects” tool. Apart from lomography, Phixr can now simulate el-cheapo cameras as the chinese Holga, add a vignette effect and imitate a night vision device. This tool also now allows reducing the effect’s impact by changing its opacity (ie fading it into the original photo).

The “special effects” tool now offers 10 presets for each effect for fine-tuning, and features the opacity slider to blend in the original image (exactly like the color effects and camera effects tools).

The old “blur” tool got some new companions, such as a soften tool and an effect invented by Michael Orton.

The “special effects”, “blur”, “sharpen” and “despeckle” tools have new preview feature: Click into the right thumbnail and see left a part of the photo in its original size as it would look after applying the respective effect.

Rather embarrassing, but anyhow: We fixed a bug in the “add border” tool (the golden frame didn’t actually work), and we finally and once and for all fixed the contrast and brightness sliders (which sometimes didn’t do what they were supposed to do.)

We will deal with the new effects in upcoming blog post. Here a just a few random samples: